Whalers and Their Foes Enlist Scientists

By JAMES BROOKE

Published: June 4, 2002

SHIMONOSEKI, Japan—
With the hunting of hundreds of whales at stake, the debate over the scientific value of Japan's whaling program boils down to dueling photograph displays of whale digestive systems.

Whale stomachs, freshly sliced open and brimming with glistening fish, were featured in glossy booklets offered by Japanese officials at the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission here in late May. Here, they said, was proof that the world's largest animals were taking fish from the mouths of humans.

Whale feces were featured in competing information sheets. Australian and American scientists argue that DNA research on feces and skin enables scientists to learn about whales without killing them.

In this southern port, once known as ''Whale City,'' the debate is not abstract. Japan's five-vessel whaling fleet, the last major one in the world, is based here. This year it plans to kill 700 whales: 440 minke whales in Antarctic waters and 260 in the North Pacific -- 10 sperm whales, 50 Bryde's whales, 150 minke and 50 sei whales, a species classified as endangered by the World Conservation Union.

The whale meat is sold for food. But because the International Whaling Commission has imposed a moratorium on commercial whaling since 1986, Japan has continued whaling under a self-allocated quota for ''scientific whaling.'' (Selling the meat, it says, is required by a commission rule that forbids wasting the byproducts of scientific research.) Norway, the only other large-scale whale-hunting nation, formally objected to the moratorium and continued with its hunt, killing about 675 last year. The United States opposes commercial whaling, allowing whaling only for traditional purposes, largely by Alaskan Natives.

''Nonlethal means for studying diets of whales simply do not provide the required data,'' Seiji Ohsumi, director general of the Institute of Cetacean Research, a Japanese government agency, told the conference.

Japan also argues that populations of many whale species have rebounded so rapidly in the past 15 years that they are putting fisheries at risk. ''It is estimated that as much as 250 million to 440 million tons of living marine resources are consumed by cetaceans,'' said Tsutomu Takebe, the Japanese minister of agriculture, forestry and fisheries. ''This is the equivalent of three to five times the annual harvest of marine capture fisheries in the world.''

Dr. Ohsumi says that only whale carcasses can provide ''ear plugs for age determination studies; reproductive organs for examination of maturation, reproductive cycles and reproductive rates; stomachs for analysis of food consumption; and blubber thickness as a measure of condition.'' The number of minkes killed each year, nearly 500, ''is the smallest number required to obtain statistically valid results,'' Dr. Ohsumi said.

But many environmentalists, diplomats and scientists at the conference questioned the value of Japan's research.

''Japan is not killing whales in order to do research,'' said Richard N. Mott, international policy vice president for the World Wildlife Fund. ''It is doing research in order to kill whales.''

In Sydney, Dr. Nick Gales, principal research scientist with the Antarctic division of Australia's Environment Department, has said that feces, easily collected with nets, can be analyzed using DNA methods to identify what whales eat, the parasites they carry, their sex and other characteristics.

Other scientists use nonlethal darts to take skin core biopsies, said Dr. Phillip J. Clapham, a whale biologist at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Mass., who estimated that 3,500 research darts had been fired into humpback whales in the North Atlantic over the last decade.

Fired from crossbows or rifles, these darts burrow about an inch into a whale's skin, then pop out and float in the water. Very few are lost or get stuck in whales, Dr. Clapham said. DNA analysis of the skin samples allow identification of the whales. In one case, he said, a whale identified by a skin dart off northern Norway was identified several years later in the Caribbean.

Noting that the Japanese Antarctic whaling program had published just half a dozen papers in international journals over the last decade, he said, ''This is a terrible record for a huge program that has been operating for years and killing thousands of animals for research.''

The Japanese assertion that rising whale populations endanger global fish stocks is also bitterly controversial. Mr. Takebe, the agriculture minister, approvingly noted that ''competition between whales and fisheries'' is to be studied by the fisheries committee of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, though he did not mention that the panel's head is a colleague, Masayuki Komatsu, Japan's deputy delegate to the International Whaling Commission.

Environmentalists say that there are no reliable censuses of whales.

The Food and Agriculture Organization says worldwide hauls of fish have increased since the whaling moratorium began, to 90 million tons a year in the 1990's from 75 million tons in the 1980's. Japanese officials retort that Japan's catch has dropped in half since 1988, registering only 6.5 million tons in 2000.